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So, guys at Standford are gonna be rich. “Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices.”

I had to look up “nanowire” in Wikipedia to understand what it is exactly: “A nanowire is a wire of diameter of the order of a nanometer (10−9 meters). Alternatively, nanowires can be defined as structures that have a lateral size constrained to tens of nanometers or less and an unconstrained longitudinal size. At these scales, quantum mechanical effects are important — hence such wires are also known as “quantum wires“. Many different types of nanowires exist, including metallic (e.g., Ni, Pt, Au), semiconducting (e.g., Si, InP, GaN, etc.), and insulating (e.g., SiO2,TiO2). Molecular nanowires are composed of repeating molecular units either organic (e.g. DNA) or inorganic (e.g. Mo6S9-xIx).”